The Game
Running like your life depends on it, you must outsmart your oppressor using your wits and a few little tricks you have up your sleeve. By utilising the cheat matrix you can outsmart and outplay your oppressor to see how long you can survive.
This was the very first time I had used unreal engine, and lets just say it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Approaching a brand new game engine is scary, but with this challenge ahead of me I put my best foot forward as I began my biggest hurdle of this project, learning Unreal Engine 5’s (UE5) blueprint coding.
The engine itself took some getting used to. After exclusively using unity for the past year and a half coming to UE5 meant I had to learn their lingo. GameObjects have now turned into Actors and the canvas was now called a viewport, everything had a new look. Alas, I found the engine to be very intuitive and thoroughly enjoyed the learning process.
The Process
The Challenges
Blueprints were a grand challenge for me at first, learning how to reference actors and put together the scripts took days for me to figure out. But when it clicked, it was smooth sailing from then on out. Something I particularly love about game development are the challenges that coding presents. It’s the problem solving that really intrigues me and pushes me to keep going, and then being able to see my code come to life and functional (although never in the way that it should) is really rewarding.
The Design
For my first project in UE5 I wanted to create a game with a simple game loop so to ensure quality in my product. Sticking to a brief that revolved around using cheats, I developed a range of unique mechanics to make the game feel unfair, in favour of the player.
Further, I had a goal to design a map that would provide the player with multiple options for outplay potential, whether that was through using the cheats in synergy with this or just using the raw space to outmaneuver the oppressor.
I had a goal to create a mechanic that allowed the player to use the ‘cheat matrix’ more fluidly, using colour on the keys to illustrate to the player what they needed to click next, to enable them to reach more of a flow state, rather than having to pay more attention to the combinations to activate a cheat. Alas, due to time constraints the mechanic couldn’t be finalised in time and didn’t make it to the final build.